How to un see Magenta cast?

[SrMi]

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5 minutes ago, pedaes said:

Give 'Daylight' a try (on M11).

As the famous Beatles song goes:

"... all we are saying is give manual WB a chance ..."

[250swb]

1 hour ago, Carlos cruz said:

Sorry I am really useless when it comes to reading intentions, emotions etc 
Magenta shouldn’t be a problem when shooting raw. Having to fix it with every photo is definitely problematic. I am more and more convinced that I’ll go to m12 from m10

Why are you having to do it with 'every photo', even the worlds greatest only get 3 keepers from a roll of 36 with the same ratio for digital. It isn't like it's a few minutes work if you can edit your work. 

And while this whole magenta cast thing can be corrected by pressing 'Auto Color' in Photoshop or Lightroom there are many photographers who use a colour cast for their own aesthetic ends. The old 1950's National Geographic magazines never used a realistic colour palette by their use of Kodachrome and readers loved it, it made the world look exotic. It's only since digital photography that there has been a 'rule' by which the photographers opinion became subservient to the technology and not with an aesthetically biased choice of film type.

Edited June 1 by 250swb

[Smudgerer]

15 hours ago, Velo-city said:

With decades of working in professional cinema in various capacities all of which involve final picture grading sessions, I definitely would not agree that the likes of Arri/sony cinema cameras have unexpected colours. Far from it they have extremely detailed data sheets and luts and are well respected for their colour accuracy and realism. 
 

Colourists don't actually often neutral grade anything based on grey charts - other than perhaps specific technical/calibration tests  in pre-production - because mostly nowadays looks are already set with the DoP / grading facility in advance so that even the dailies are somewhat pre-graded via luts and live grading onset, and those grades form the basis for final grading sessions, which as you correctly say are usually quite heavily stylised because you’re not flicking through individual images you are immersed in scenes for a long time so you can absorb colour palettes quite differently to stills and often even blend to different palettes over the course of the film. But when you turn all the creative Luts off in the camera, and set them correctly, in my experience you do not ever see randomly magenta outputs for example, and it doesn’t vary from body to body either.

With modern digital stills  cameras, there’s an expectation that they capture the scene with realistic colours, which can then be manipulated afterwards. The starting point should not be having to do individual fixes seemingly randomly just to balance them all - not to the extent the M11 requires (for some people) anyway. If Leica had cinema cameras that performed like  the M11, all experienced DoPs would block their use and Leica would be a laughing stock.

As a side note, for cinema releases the grading would primarily be projected rather than monitors but yes those projectors are insanely expensive. Colour science is complicated but pretty well understood nowadays with established workflows. No gods required, it’s all science and technology. 

Hello Velo-city, there's quite a bit in what you say that I do agree with and like you I too have had decades in the "game" as a DP and also a partner in a post production / transfer house too so I'm not unfamiliar with the processes, and yes I do agree that digital cinema sensors are tuned to be much "truer" than those that are installed in still cameras but there can still be some variances that come about and need addressing in grading / timing. For instance when grading footage from a multi camera shoot, I've seen slight differences even when A/B/C etc cameras are the same marque and version from roughly the same camera angle and especially so when matching skin-tones, ( in my experience not so much with Arri, but more so with RED, Sony is somewhere in the middle )............And there's also times when we have to wander off the "true colour" grading to match back to other scenes, and every colourist seems to have their preferred methodology to get to a base and the DP's who use them consistently know this and shoot accordingly. I used the same colourist for close to 20 years, for good reason.......And yes again, I agree of course that there's quite a difference between grading for projection rather than TV release, we've done both many times.

Film grading is somewhat different and to my mind a much more preferable working medium, ( my work was 80% in film even unto recent years ), in that the "sensor" was more consistent because film-stock usually was/is so, but even so when in a long form production we tried to batch order / reserve from Kodak our shooting stock from the same production run to get consistency when it came to post / grading, even though, and even then with some multi-camera shoots one could see subtle variations due to different lenses on the A/B/C etc cameras, again mostly with skin-tones.

So it's all a bit of a mix, then plug in the different ways we all see colours and tones you could spend an inordinate amount of time in the colour correction suite trying to satisfy everyone, but that was good for business when the rooms are booked on a hourly or daily basis!

And yes again I totally agree with your Leica comments, it is all rather pathetic that they don't seem to care enough to give consistency in their colour science, it's as if that beyond a certain point they don't really care.

"Gods?".......a joke that might have gotten lost in the shuffle.

 

Edited June 2 by Smudgerer

[MattiasAndersson]

20 hours ago, Ne314satel said:

is this better? without the magenta cast)

LOVELY !

[Derbyshire Man]

22 hours ago, SrMi said:

AWB or Cloudy in the post-processor may fix it, too, right?

Most of the time, the choice of WB should fit the photographer's preference, not what it was. If you must have the original colors, one should not trust AWB and use a grey card to white balance.

I believe photographers still use AWB because WB does not matter when shooting raw, and AWB gives you approximate colors for efficient image review.

P.S.: My Q-s are all now in manual WB.

I tried altering the different white balances and it made very little difference. Certainly none got anywhere near the true to life Q3 version, none impacted on the amount of magenta. As I said in the previous post I was able to correct via the white bucket but it's a pretty enormous colour cast.

[Smogg]

15 minutes ago, Derbyshire Man said:

I tried altering the different white balances and it made very little difference. Certainly none got anywhere near the true to life Q3 version, none impacted on the amount of magenta. As I said in the previous post I was able to correct via the white bucket but it's a pretty enormous colour cast.

It doesn't matter what white balance you set in the camera (AWB or Daylight). You will still get cast to a greater or lesser extent. After exporting to Lightroom, batch change WB to daylight.

[kiwidad]

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On 6/1/2025 at 1:54 PM, Derbyshire Man said:

Here's the same shot with a q3 and M11 on AWB. Yes I can largely correct with the eyedropper on the white bucket and a bit of manipulation of saturation.

Can you guess which is the M11😀 

Both the M11P and M11D are the same.

The Q3 image is colour accurate.

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The one on the right looks warmed. Without test instruments to measure light color falling on the subject it’s sorta pointless exercise! 

[kiwidad]

How did you survive with film? The labs had to hate you? Which shift did you choose in film choice?

Edited June 2 by kiwidad

[setuporg]

The most insightful bit of info about the magenta cast was here somewhere where the owner sent it back to Leica and it came back without the cast.  The theory was poor calibration that could be redone.  When I had M11 I did not see the cast but I'd have considered service if I did.

[graphlex]

As a newcomer to M11-dom, I find the Adobe "Adaptive Color" profile useful as a starting point, for color correction and some other things.  It helps my own eyes to exorcise their visions of magenta.🙂

[LBJ2]

Did Adobe Lightroom Classic improve the Leica M11 magenta cast applied via high default WB-Tint values ?

I've always noticed Adobe was the most magenta-aggressive of the big name RAW editors that I personally compared for processing Leica M11 files, always applying the highest WB/Tint values, no matter the Adobe profile selected.

I recently noticed when loading up my M11 files in LRC v14.3.1, upon import of my M11 files with default WB = "As Shot" I saw the usual Adobe heavy-handed LRC applied WB/TINT values of approximately +18 to +22 range depending upon the WB set in-camera. However,  if I select Adobe WB = Auto, Daylight, Cloudy or Shade then Adobe applies much lower TINT values (+10 and below) resulting in minimal to no magenta cast. *Like many others, I would normally manually adjust the WB/TINT to lower values in LRC to eliminate magenta cast.  

Is this old news and I am just now discovering? 

*LRC v14.3.1 ( I think is the latest) and the M11 v2.2.3

Edited June 6 by LBJ2

[jaapv]

Old news in a sense that using your own profile will solve such problems for all practical purposes in general, but yes, this sounds like a good solution as well. 

[don daniel]

Old news in a sense that using the settings in Lightroom will not show a magenta cast, but using the WB-settings of the M11 will, both in DNG and in JPG.

[jaapv]

3 minutes ago, don daniel said:

Old news in a sense that using the settings in Lightroom will not show a magenta cast, but using the WB-settings of the M11 will, both in DNG and in JPG.

I miss the word "default"

[don daniel]

vor 3 Stunden schrieb jaapv:

I miss the word "default"

Old news in a sense that using the default settings in Lightroom (Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Shade) will not show a magenta cast, but using the WB-settings of the M11 will, both in DNG (in LR "As shot") and in JPG.

Do you agree?